Tuesday 2 September 2008

Ubuntu on MacBook G4

I like Ubuntu - I'm not ashamed to say it. Don't get me wrong, it isn't perfect but it has a nice balance between speed and ease of use.

On Intel based PCs I've had very few problems installing Ubuntu on Laptops, so when a colleage of mine wanted to install it on his MacBook G4 Ubuntu 8.04 was the recommended choice.

By and large Ubuntu tends to have pretty good hardware support - and the Power PC version is no exception. . . or so I'd like to believe.

Most things do work well. The graphics - no problem. Onboard network? Yep, worked as expected. USB support - don't spare it a second thought. Wireless? Ah, yes, well, erm. . .

Wireless is a nightmare to configure - and we stil haven't got the damn thing working properly. Although there are tools to make it easier - they didn't work correctly either. So we were left with wireless networks that we could see - but we couldn't connect to.

I think given enough time I could probably get it working (see here for some examples of the hoops people jump through on PowerBooks) and some time spent searching Google brought up plenty of other examples (like this, or this, or this).

So it does appear that it can be got to work - but only with a fair bit of effort (and more than a bit of luck too).

Luckily the rest of his Ubuntu experience seems to be going well - and he actually seems to be enjoying using it at the moment - so could this be the start of someone moving from OSX to Ubuntu? I'll keep you posted.

(I'm still annoyed about the wireless though!)

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